The latest Ofcom report, Tomorrow's Wireless World, provides a nice counterbalance to the hype put out by the Wifi industry, which likes to pretend that there is no such thing as contention and that radio links are simple replacements for wires.

The report points out the obvious fact that the more devices that use the crowded unlicensed bands, particularly the 2.4GHz bands used by Bluetooth and Wi-fi, the more likely there will the contention and service degradation.

It is to launch a study of congestion to facilitate spectrum management, and it says much more needs to be known about how wireless propagates in and around buildings.

Perhaps this will be borne in mind by those people blithely promoting Wifi as a replacement for wired networks, rather than as an edge link to complement them.

The report also outline some possible future uses for wireless networks, some of them familiar to those of us who do the round of conferences.

So-called body-area networks could be used to monitor the vital organs of peope with ill health; home hubs could dispense pills and alert a doctor or carer if they are not taken; a smart inhaler could alert asthmatics of poor atmospheric conditions.

It suggests that RFID tags in stores could alert allergics to dangers in foods, cars could automatically alert the authorities when they crash, and also flash radio alerts of braking to a void cars running into each other.